Sep05
Watercolor Beauty
It’s not my original design, but it’s definitely the most beautiful card I think I’ve ever made! It appears on the cover of our catalog, and I LOVE this card and had everything I needed to make it, accept I don’t own the All Scallops stamp set. Well, I thought of a way to case the card and reproduce the scalloped edge with a chocolate chip marker and a hole punch.
I have really found my preference for watercoloring. I have used crayons, pencils with waterbrush, markers, and misting my stamped image with water, but I really like painting with our water brush and using my ink pads. The brush pack comes in two sizes also, for smaller and larger line artwork. I just find this technique quick, easy and no mess! I also advise you to use our watercolor paper, which I used here and for the snowman in the last post. However, you can also use our confetti white/cream papers too, because you need a thicker, fibrous and pourous paper that can accept the water without pilling up. Stamp your image in black or brown stazon, or craft ink and let it dry before you watercolor. You can even emboss the image with clear powder after you’ve stamped the image with colored craft ink and then watercolor it.
The base of the card is kraft card stock. The two flower images and the birds come from a gorgeous stamp set, Eastern Influences, part of our style watch, stamped on watercolor paper. The sentiment is from One of a Kind which is framed by Frames with a Flourish, stamped on confetti white card stock. I REALLY love that stamp set, and its size of frames accommodate almost all sizes of sentiments. It also has neat flourishes that you can use on top or bottom or both of any photo, frame, picture mat, or sentiment. You’ll see an example of the flourish in my next post.
The color inks are the base colors of the Bella Rose Designer Series papers, which I used a small strip of the red damask under the kiwi kiss striped ribbon and a small square of the CC polka dot under the framed sentiment. The inks are chocolate chip, riding hood red, and kiwi kiss. I used a little bit of sahara sand and going gray on the birds. I used our new scalloped edge punch for the bottom border of the card, and then used the chocolate chip marker to "dot" the scalloped edges; the large end for the large dots and small end for the smaller dots. I punched 1/16" holes in the center of each larger brown dot at the "top" of each scallop.
All stamped images were cut out (tediously) and raised with dimensionals. The end result is definitely worth the time! Even if you don’t find cutting stamped images out as relaxing as I do, you could stamp all of these images on a piece of watercolor paper, masking the largest flower before you stamp the frame, so it appears under the rose.
Enjoy!
Cards, Punches, Tools, frames, techniques
